Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" engages adolescents with its theme about the dangers of complete societal equality. Learners complete a graphic organizer to track literary elements in the story, as well as an inference...

A six-week unit takes high schoolers through various works of African-American literature, including poems, plays, and short stories. The lesson plan format includes a week-by-week description of activities, goals, materials, and...

High school readers examine George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant" for examples of symbolism, metaphor, connotation, and irony. They analyze how these literary tools convey the writer's main point and contribute to the persuasive...

Students write a personification poem and identify its use. They make a pattern worksheet and then use Photoshop Elements skills to illustrate their poem. Students use layer styles with the text to highlight the poetry.

Students explore the book Billy Brown and the Belly Button Beastie. In this verb, onomatopoeia, and syllable lesson, students pantomime verbs, read onomatopoeia from the story and clap out syllables. Students unscramble sentences from...

Improve your young poets' descriptive writing with this lesson on personification. A SMART board and PowerPoint presentation guide your class through the process of identifying human qualities attributed to various non-human objects. A...

Use folk tales as inspiration for learning about and using personification in creative writing. Learners brainstorm together in order to practice personification before writing their own poems or paragraphs about a household object.

To whom it may concern ... Scholars undergo the process of writing a letter to an authority figure. The lesson asks writers to compose a formal letter requesting a music therapy space. Pupils learn how to submit a project proposal to any...

Barbie has been an iconic figure in the lives of girls since the 1950s, but her existence has been full of controversy. A lesson plan on style, format, and genre explores that controversy by looking at three texts with different...

Clement Moore's "Twas the Night Before Christmas" models the power of descriptive language for middle schoolers. They identify the similes and metaphors in the tale and consider what these descriptions add to the story's emotional...

Sixth graders explore geometric figures. In this geometry lesson, 6th graders manipulate properties and relationships of geometric figures to identify objects on the coordinate planes and describe where figures sit on the planes.

Here is an effective way to have your charges practice and model important listening skills. After a short review of effective active listening concepts, such as using body language, summarizing what the other person said, and asking...

Explore the tendency of the English language to change by reviewing the British idiom "bog standard." An audio talk is accessible via hyperlink and questions and worksheets are included for learners. The lesson is a good way to work on...

Who would you love to see at your table? Groups research a decade, ranging from the 1840s to the 1960s, read a short story associated with that decade, and plan a dinner party, complete with table set-up and menu. After researching...

Use the story "Bearstone" by Will Hobbs to explore issues related to growing up. In this work, a troubled teen finds himself through an adventure in the wilderness. Learners practice summarizing, drawing inferences and conclusions, and...

Draw back the curtain, add a spot of joy to your class, and let learners be lessoned by a close reading exercise that models how to develop an interpretation based on evidence drawn from a text. Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My...

A reading of a New York Times review of the movie Beloved launches research into how the Civil War affected the lives of people living during this period. Creative thinkers select a person from an included list of historical figures and...

Brian Jacques’ novel Redwall provides the focus for a series of lessons involving the analysis of folklore. Adopting the persona of a character, groups write letters in the voice of their character, assemble a collage using Microsoft...

Read and analyze a variety of Shakespearean and contemporary puns using Visual Thesaurus computer software. Middle and high schoolers analyze a pun as a class; in small groups they analyze a Shakespearean pun using contextual clues and...

Middle schoolers analyze the speaker's ideas and tone in the Billy Collins poem "The Lanyard." After identifying how each of the five senses is addressed in the poem, they compare images to draw conclusions about the speaker and his...

Use O. Henry's ubiquitous tale of love and poverty to explore irony. After reading the story, middle schoolers identify examples of all three kinds of irony in the story. With partners, they brainstorm original examples of irony. Then...

Are your advanced learners reading authentic Latin this year? Whether you're teaching Caesar, Cicero or Virgil, use some of these strategies to map out your unit. What do you focus on? Consider taking small passages and making that the...

Experiment with light and dark in a series of interactive activities that lead up to reading and writing poetry. Class members have the opportunity to observe their feelings while sitting in the light and dark and to play with shadow...

Explore word relationships and the relationships between people with an interesting lesson. Learners practice pairing words that typically go together and write brief narratives using these words. They then go through a similar process,...